Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 168
Scan 168
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
12 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLIN BOWS
3few likely strips. This accounts for the high prices of Tourte bows, even when first produced.
5They were doubtless largely labours of love with this matchless artificer, who could neither read nor write. The nut would be often made of tortoise-shell, jewelled with mother-of-pearl, and gleaming with a gold screw button. These cost £12, and would now fetch, if ever they came into the open market, fancy prices. His bows, mounted in silver with ebon nuts, sold for three guineas, and now fetch £30.
7Tourte père originated the backward bend of the bow, which is not cut but artificially bent by heat; but both the father's and the eldest son's bows are held to be now too short for the strain of execution put upon them by modern players—not so Francois Tourte's, and all bows made "after Tourte."
9He fixed the proportions—length, between 29·134 inches and 29·528 inches. The weight of the bend is nicely poised with the gold, tortoise-shell, or ebon of the nut; in each is a small wedge, as may be seen in Fig. vi., which nips the hairs and keeps them flat. The fine selection of hairs, 150 to 200 (modern exigencies require more, or up to 250), the careful flattening of it out, the preference for live hair, or hair combed out and not taken from dead horses who may have lain some time in the shambles; above all, the exquisitely graduated thicknesses, now held to be de rigueur, all characterise the intuitive genius of Tourte.
11I say advisedly "intuitive genius," for Tourte had no education but that of a watch-maker. This may,
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